Manifesto

Viva Zapata! was born on the Boreal Fall of 2004, although its history can be traced back to an Austral Spring on the threshold of the millennium.

Viva Zapata! doesn’t feel at home in only one place but anywhere: in the Northern or Southern hemisphere, in the center or in the periphery, in a populated city of ten million people or in a small Patagonic town of several thousand.

Viva Zapata!is art and artifice.

• Because it believes in inspiration, interpretation, and artistic sampling, as well as in creation and recycling, in inventiveness and boldness.
• Because the final product ends up being completely different from the original idea: many hours of work, brainstorming, endless winters and thousands of miles in between.

Viva Zapata! is a collective creation, hand crafted and limited.

• Because in Viva Zapata! many brains conspire and everyone pitches in. 
• Because Viva Zapata! believes in the dignity of work, and elbows its way amidst the big corporate clones and the sweatshops.
• Because Viva Zapata!’s small scale reproduction leaves a margin to invent and reinvent, to cut it up and try it out, to see what comes of it. 

That’s why each bag, each piece of clothing, each accessory is only identical to itself, an individual within a species, one part of a larger whole. 
Because the humanity of each piece is rooted in a collective project whose participants refuse to be anonymous.

Viva Zapata! suggests outbursts of originality and invites you to break the rules.

Viva Zapata! believes that explanations have to be provided, but sometimes the only answer is “just because”.